Don Roberts’ Fit 24/7 Gym keeps things simple. His gym does not boast a sauna, day care, or exercise classes. Customers know to follow the rules or get kicked out. And his club is open every day, 24 hours a day, frequently without a single employee on premise. Stripped bare of any extras and run entirely by himself, his 550-member facility in Durango, Colorado, has been profitable — very profitable, he insists — from day one. The key to making money is minimal expenses and 24 hour access. The advantage of 24-hour gyms In a time when nearly 20 percent of gyms closed permanently [...]
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How Much Old School Is Too Much? There is a certain romance to the idea of a hardcore backstreet gym where you find the driven athletes and bodybuilders. One that's as run down on the inside as it is on the outside. You can imagine the grisly old owner-slash-coach taking payments in cash and keeping accounts in his head. Only Hollywood writers and Elmore Leonard could get away with this idea of a seedy and decrepit shed. The reality is that the club industry is hyper-competitive and if you want to attract the type of consumers who are committed to [...]
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Keeping your gym clean is a topic that I like to return to occasionally. I do so because it's one of the keys to success in gym management. It's vitally important to your business success. This is a review and a reminder about this topic and I'm sure that I'll come back to it again in the future. This time I'm going to relate cleaning to the core values of your team. "Values" is one of those topics that sound like business school buzzwords (because it is). But it's a buzzword because there's a lot of truth to it and [...]
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No matter which show I watch: Bar Rescue, Restaurant Impossible, Tabitha's Salon Takeover, and even the long gone but much loved We Mean Business (hosted by Apprentice winner Bill Rancic), there is one common element: every single business that the hosts enter is FILTHY! The aforementioned shows are my soap operas; I simply can't get enough of them. I love peering into other people's businesses and seeing how they're run and what sets them apart. There's one thing that consistently horrifies and bemuses me: the cleanliness of the business. Every entrepreneur knows what it's like to have to scrimp and [...]
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